 Legal Document Retention
Kevin Steele is a system administrator supporting close to 500 Mac and PC computers and the needs of doctors, faculty and other staff at Baylor College of Medicine. He discovered Drobo when several doctors purchased it to protect their medical data.
As a technical expert, Kevin was comfortable creating RAID storage. Over time he has built RAID storage using Adaptec controllers – typically in the 2TB range with five 400 gigabyte drives. He also has several Apple XServe RAID configurations and a 1.6TB RAID from Dell that cost him $3,500.
Increasing RAID Capacity is Difficult
Much of the work done at Baylor is in genetics. The most accurate DNA analysis files typically take up 10 to 20 megabytes per image. While, in the past, tests have had to be run one gene at a time, Baylor is beginning to use microarray chips, which allow multiple genetic tests to be run in parallel. While the results are not as definitive as single gene tests, they do give an indication of the likelihood of many different problems occurring. And there is a cost-savings that comes from running multiple-tests at the same time. A single CHIP file takes about 1GB of disk space.
The need to back up these files has been a critical concern for Kevin. With RAID, Kevin seemed to frequently fill up available disk space. Twice in the past 18 months, he exceeded available disk space and had to choose between the high expense of adding another RAID or the time-consumption of increasing the capacity of existing RAID storage.
Drobo makes solving this problem simple, allowing Kevin to expand capacity by swapping a large drive in for a smaller one. There’s nothing to configure or rebuild. Kevin said, “As the amount of disk space I require increases, I can increase Drobo’s size just by inserting a large drive. What a wonderful thing that is!”
DroboShare a Simple Way to Share Drobo
 Another problem Drobo solves for Kevin is backing up files from all the computers. Previously, he had to set up a backup server and dedicate important server processing cycles to the relatively menial backup task. DroboShare eliminates this need. Kevin can replace a server with Droboshare, and have a backup target that is easily accessible for all of Baylor’s Mac and Windows computers, at a fraction of the cost of a server.
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